From Connecticut to Calabria and Back:
Hartford-Born Novelist Juliet Grames’s Writing Honors Italian-American Immigrants
by Daniela Antonina Ragusa
Novelist Juliet Grames’s was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1983; her professional writing career began seventeen years later as a senior at Simsbury High School. A 2001 Hartford Courant article reports how Grames and a friend published and sold a collection of personal essays by students in their Advanced Placement English class to raise money for the Make-A-Wish-Foundation: “We were walking up Talcott Mountain one day and discussing how it was a shame these essays were just for one-time use,” Grames said.
Eighteen years after graduation, author’s notes in her first book “The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna” thank several influential English teachers for setting her on the writer’s path (before earning a History degree from Columbia University.) Her writerly mission to produce books with a distinct purpose and with gratitude for those who shaped her consciousness continues in her second novel “The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia.” Author’s notes here explain Grames’s focus on Italians and Italian-American immigrants who have been misrepresented by outsiders in vintage travelogues: “Calabria’s lack of representation is the product of the marginalization of its citizenry, who have historically been blocked from the resources that would allow them to tell their own stories…Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria (1915)…saw his human subjects as zoological phenomena…I have long felt my grandmother’s people deserve less problematic representation.”
So just as her sister Katherine Grames’s illustrated map of the Calabrian mountain village in the fictitious “Santa Chionia” in The Lost Boy provides a geographical layout for readers to better understand Calabrian topography, Grames’s books illustrate her characters’ experiences, and in the case of her first novel, the importance of Hartford as the setting for one family’s immigrant experience in Hartford. Artist Michael Hall illustrated the real “Ievoli” in Stella Fortuna.
The Seven of Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
The character of Stella Fortuna in the eponymously titled novel is based on Grames’s grandmother; in an interview with Debutiful, she explains: “My grandmother—who was born in a small village in Calabria, in Southern Italy, and who emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager—had eight near-death experiences over the course of her very long life. I’d wanted to write about her almost unbelievable personal story and the world she came from since I was a little girl.” Grames’s reimagining her grandmother’s immigrant journey paves her own way as a storyteller as Stella’s story is told in the third person.
In her first book, there is Stella Fortuna herself, a young woman whose first and last names literally mean “Star Luck,” who emigrates with her family to Hartford, Connecticut from Calabria, Italy in December 1939, mere months before Mussolini declares war on France and Britain. As their boat approaches the shoreline, the family’s first attempt at English is repeating the phrase “Merry Christmas” in heavy accents just before sighting the Statue of Liberty, described to them as the “Madonna of New York Harbor” who has given them safe passage. Along with her father Antonio, her brothers Giuseppe and Luigi, her mother Assunta, and her sister Tina, Stella and her family experience their first snowfall and the unbearably cold climate of Hartford in winter. It is the first in a series of hardships in a new land that offers them many opportunities, but also heartache.
Hartford History and Immigrant Heritage
As a major setting at the heart of the novel, Grames gives Hartford an important focus in the narrative. After leaving Ievoli, Stella and her family land in Hartford where they live in a small tenement apartment on Front Street with thin walls, poor heating, and no backyard garden. Stella must share a bedroom (and a bed) with her younger sister, Tina. The chapter titled “Youth,” opens with Stella experiencing a nightmare that propels her in a violent somnambulant state to nearly leaping from a window, only to be stopped by her father and thus escaping her fifth near-death experience.
This frightening opening also serves to foreshadow darkness in her father’s character, though other clues are found in “Youth”—her father’s total control of the family’s finances, his drinking habits, and the open secret of his frequenting prostitutes. Although he is a flawed character, Stella’s father Antonio promises his wife that he will save enough money to move the family to a more comfortable house on Bedford Street, and he encourages his children to study to attain their citizenship hoping it will lead to better work opportunities and higher earnings.
Although the Front Street apartment is insufficient for the family of six, life in Hartford has its benefits compared to life in the village of Ievoli—in Hartford there are indoor toilets that flush, more abundant choices in food shopping, preparation, and nutrition, and even though they may be shabby, second-hand clothing donated to the family by local charities that is nicer than anything the family owned before coming to America. In addition to the night classes for new immigrants the Fortuna children take at Hartford High, it is mandatory for them to attend public schools until age sixteen, but formal education is a foreign concept to people who previously subsisted through agricultural means in the old country.
The Fortuna family learns about American life in all these ways, but their greatest lessons come from the world of work. In the “Youth” chapter, readers see Stella, her mother, and siblings being picked up by a bus on Farmington Avenue and transported to a nearby tobacco farm to pick leaves in the burning hot sunshine for sixty cents a day. They labor alongside Jamaican migrant workers who visit Hartford in the summer to earn hard-earned American dollars to take back to their Caribbean home when the season ends.
The Fortunas do not return to Ievoli. Instead, Stella and Tina eventually move on to do piecework labor in a local laundry where they are paid by the number of shirts they can iron in a shift rather than being paid per diem. The desire to buy a home of their own compels them to work hard and save their collective earnings. The “Youth” chapter ends with a trip to the G. Fox studio to have a family portrait taken by a professional photographer, sealing this portion of the narrative of the Fortunas’ life in Hartford. Eventually Stella marries Carmelo and has a brood of children, both mostly against her will. She survives multiple near-fatal accidents and endures to the end of her story, a quiet heroine.
The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
After much success with The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, Grames’s sophomore effort is a mystery novel. It features an American woman on a rescue mission in Santa Chionia, a village based on the real ghost town of Africo in Calabria which was forcibly depopulated by a flood in October of 1951. Rather than an omniscient narrator as in the first novel, the story of The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is recounted by a first-person narrator. She is another formidable woman: a 27-year-old trained by the fictitious organization Child Rescue (based on Save the Children, not the organization that fights child trafficking today). Francesca Loftfield visits her forebears’ homeland to teach mothers basic hygiene to prevent disease and reduce child mortality. She also aims to establish a formal early childhood education program in Santa Chionia, the likes of which did not exist decades ago in the Mezzogiorno.
The novel begins with torrential rains soon after Francesca arrives in 1960; the resulting flood makes her job of bringing change to a centuries-old culture nearly impossible. In addition to her outreach work, Francesca becomes the driving force to investigate the coverup of a possible murder when a long-buried skeleton is unearthed by flood waters. Despite the fact that Santa Chionia is described to Francesca as a matriarchy, men hold traditional power in the village, so Francesca must go against Calabrian sex roles in her quest to uncover the truth. When her work threatens Francesca’s wellbeing, she remembers a mentor’s sage advice: “You must think of yourself not as an engine of change but a conduit. You are not a battery; you are a wire. The energy for change flows through you, not from you. You are there to complete the circuit.” As an educated, strong-willed activist, Francesca Loftfield’s character operates against stereotypes of Italian-American women found in most popular stories.
Calabrian Language and Culture
Calabrian culture radiates from the heart of both of Grames’s novels and her ancestors’ dialect provides the words necessary to unearth its buried history. “Chionia” from the second novel’s title means “snow” and the name belongs to the historical Greek saint martyred in Thessalonica in 304 AD. The villagers in Grames’s fictitious Calabrian enclave speak “Greco,” a language closer to Greek than Italian; the setting of the second novel mirrors the Latinate village from which Grames’s grandmother emigrated.
Using standard Italian and the Calabrian dialect she is familiar with, Grames interviewed inhabitants of Southern Italy’s “Mezzogiorno” region (“noon” in Italian for the intensity of the sunshine at midday and historically known for poverty and organized crime). Grames’s research brought her to the “Aspromonte” (the Calabrian mountain range’s name comes from Italian and Greek roots meaning “white mountain”), an isolated and dangerous, yet beautiful, landscape. The Calabrian landscape itself and the region’s language and culture compelled Grames to explore her roots and use what she discovered as inspiration for her fiction and the strong-willed female characters who populate both narratives.
From Etymology to Ethnography
An etymology lesson establishes cultural context and lays bare the ethos of Grames’s work which operates in contrast to stories about Southern Italy in American popular culture. Whereas most well-known stories from books, movies, and television about Southern Italians feature organized crime groups, Grames’s novel showcases the lives of the women who toil behind the scenes in family life or who work to ameliorate the lives of their loved ones and country folk.
Historically, there are regional names ascribed to specific crime syndicates: “cosa nostra,” or “our thing,” hails from Sicily; “camorra,” most likely derived from Spanish for “quarrel,” is used in Naples. The word “mafia” comes from the Arabic “mahias,” referring to “aggression, swagger, and bravado.” The most exotic word of the four is the Calabrian “‘Ndrangheta,” from Greek for “brave man,” one who has “gallentry” or “manly virtue” in a “society of men of honor.” The lexicon of Southern Italian dialects borrows vocabulary from many languages. Readers of Grames’s novels encounter pidgin words like the one that Stella uses in her version of Italo-English when she asks a fellow tobacco-farm worker from Jamaica, “You make test? For sitizenscippu?”
Fictional Hollywood narratives about ruthless men whose devotion to family is only equal to their distrust of outsiders are entertaining (The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc.), yet their legendary status in the culture eclipses lesser-known stories about the Mezzogiorno’s peasant class and their descendants in America. As works of historical fiction and mystery inspired by real people, Grames’s novels operate as creative ethnographies when viewed through a frame which respectively turns family stories into a universal tale about the immigrant experience (Stella Fortuna) and transforms the author herself into a heroine for truth and justice (The Lost Boy). Furthermore, the women at the center of Grames’s novels are humble and decent, and their stories contribute to a richer tapestry that represents Southern Italians, especially the women, as fully realized characters, not shadowy figures on the silver screen.
Literary Accolades and Hartford Legacy
Grames’s books have earned numerous literary accolades: The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna was shortlisted for the New England Book Award and the Connecticut Book Award, and for contribution for Southern Italian literature, Grames received Italy’s Premio Cetraro prize. In an interview with Grames for Forbes magazine, Irene S. Levine describes Stella Fortuna as a “compelling intergenerational tale…intelligently written…[which] earned a spot on The Observer’s Most Anticipated list. Its multiple threads span family bonds and family secrets, to the changing roles of women in the family and society.”
Both Grames’s novels feature stoic female lead characters whose stories are thrilling to read and which earned her writing high praise. Grames’s talent for mystery shown in The Lost Boy stems from her work as a curator for the Soho Crime imprint of Soho Press; her writing also appears in Best American Mystery & Suspense and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The website mainewriters.org humorously profiles her: “Grames lives with her husband, Paul Oliver, Director of Publicity at Soho Press and unparalleled genre advisor, in Rhode Island where they share way too many books, 12 obstreperous chickens, and the Soho Press company baby,” a son who goes unnamed for privacy.
It is my hope that students at CT State Capital and other schools who utilize The Hartford Anthology for research into authors traditionally recognized as Hartford writers (Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wallace Stevens, etc.), or those who are interested in studying the immigrant experience or Southern Italian culture, will read the works of Juliet Grames. Encountering the unforgettable women characters of Stella Fortuna and Francesca Loftfield will help students understand the power of place in fiction, whether the setting is a mountain village overlooking the Ionian Sea or a repurposed department store (G. Fox) that now houses a community college in Hartford, Connecticut.
Anthology Selections
from The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
Juliet Grames — Biographical and Critical Sources